The Quizbowl Resource Center

Dwight may have put it bluntly, but in any bracketed format there has to be a cutoff between those in championship contention and those out of it. This year's format pushes back the number of teams still in contention to 24 and spreads out the team talent more than last year's tournament did. I think we're erring even more cautiously this year than we have before, and that's one of the benefits of this year's format.

theMoMA wrote:Dwight may have put it bluntly, but in any bracketed format there has to be a cutoff between those in championship contention and those out of it. This year's format pushes back the number of teams still in contention to 24 and spreads out the team talent more than last year's tournament did. I think we're erring even more cautiously this year than we have before, and that's one of the benefits of this year's format.

This.
A bracketed round robin is among the best of formats out there. A 72 team field is kind of an awkward number in that it is probably too small to consider formats such as the one used at HSNCT. It is also probably a large enough number that providing teams a large number of prelim games becomes unfeasible. We need to be considering the times needed for lunch, tallying stats across a large number of brackets, etc when we come up with formats. We will definitely consider alternative formats presented here, and we want to reassure teams that utmost care will be taken in determining seeds and bracket arrangements.

Here's what I view as the biggest problem of bracketed round robin tournaments: Teams that just miss a particular cutoff never get a chance to "play up". Looking at last year's tournament as an example, I don't have a problem with the fact that Seven Lakes A was not given a chance to win the championship after losing a full match, having worse stats than the other teams in its pool that lost a full match, and then losing a half match. However, I think there is a problem that they did not get to play any of the top 16 teams for the rest of the tournament and never had a chance to be ranked better than 17th. When I say that there is a problem, I am keeping in mind that all formats have some problems, so this does not mean that the format was horrible and needs to be changed, and I think we all agree that the problem should only be fixed if there is a way to fix it without causing more serious problems. I do think it is important to recognize that this is a problem, however, and a serious enough problem that alternatives should be considered. I am glad that PACE is willing to listen.

The changes proposed for this year don't really fix this problem that Seven Lakes A faced last year, at least the way I define the problem. Instead of the 17th (and possibly 18th and 19th) team not getting a chance (or enough chances) to play more teams a little better than itself, which would have been both a good learning experience and a reasonable opportunity to move up in the standings (especially given the fact that finishing 2nd in one pool is far from proof that one team is better than a team that finished 3rd in a different pool), now the 25th team does not get that chance. Making the tiebreaker longer increases the chance that the right team from the pool will advance, but there is still a chance that the wrong team will advance due to an upset, and there is always a chance that the pools will not be set perfectly even though PACE generally has done a pretty good job setting pools.

This problem is not unique to PACE NSC--it is a general problem with bracketed round robin tournaments. PACE may have more of an ability to address this problem than other tournaments, however, because NSC has more rounds than most tournaments. The way to address this would be to have some matches in the superplayoffs in which some of the teams in the seed 17-24 group play against some of the teams in the 25-32 group. Similarly, some of the teams in the 41-48 group would play some matches against some of the teams from the 49-56 group. I haven't figured out how to do this yet, and, just to be clear, this should only be done if there is a good way to do it, but I think it is an idea worth playing around with.

That's an interesting take. But doesn't that somewhat decrease the quality of schedule for the teams ranked 17-24? Shouldn't we want their schedule to be as strong as possible at least as much as we want the same thing for the teams ranked 25-32?

You don't necessary want a "strong" schedule -- you want an "appropriate" schedule. Now, for teams from 17-24 at PACE, higher strength will pretty much correlate perfectly with more appropriate, and especially so given that it's nationals and you want stronger opponents above all else. But playing the 25th team at PACE likely isn't going to be noticeably and detrimentally weaker than playing the 16th team or the 19th team - especially in a Seven Lakes 2010 situation.

Bracketed playoffs perform a clean cut between tiers of the field, but team strength is more continuous than is optimal for the bracketed playoff cut to be perfectly acceptable for all.

If there were a way to drop some of the top tier teams back into the middle tier (and raise teams up from the bottom tier, too) after some playoff games, I think we'd see a lot of issues alleviated. If you've got 72 teams, after a three-tier split you've got 24-24-24; what if, after that playoff bracketing, you moved to 18-18-18-18, where the 6 lowest top tiers and 12 highest middle tiers got the consolation flight, and 12 lowest middles and 6 highest low tiers got 3rd flight? (Note - I'm talking generally here. I have no idea if 2011 PACE NSC can be done this way with regards to packet limitations.)

I think the best way to do what I mentioned in my last post would be to take the 16 teams seeded 17-32 going into the superplayoffs and put them into four even pools of four and then to put them into four pools of four that group the top four together, then the next four, etc. There are two ways to do this. One way uses a match already played in the first pool of four, which gives enough time/packets to play off ties but ends up giving untied teams one fewer match. The other way gives teams three new matches in each pool, which means that they are guaranteed the same number of matches they otherwise would be, but uses paper tiebreakers to break ties. The same thing would be done with the 16 teams seeded 41-56.

I think the problem with Brad's suggestion is that you might have to first play off ties within a pool and then use paper tiebreakers or additional tiebreaker rounds to figure out the first round of playoffs. If your goal is 18-18-18-18, then the clean way is to start with 9 pools of 8, and I believe you end up with something pretty similar to last year.

Is there a contingency plan/format in the event that the 72-team field does not fill?

Another quick question: under the 72-team format outlined above, does a team's record from the prelims carry over to the playoffs and superplayoffs? So, like, will playoff teams be regrouped for superplayoffs based on just the 5 other playoff games from their playoff pool or against all 10 games they've played to that point?

Nick wrote:Is there a contingency plan/format in the event that the 72-team field does not fill?

Naturally. Though it currently does not look like this will be a problem.

Ok ok, im sorry for all these questions, but one more: Are the playoff pools predetermined for each prelim group (1st team in prelim group A goes to playoff group X, 2nd team in prelim group A goes to playoff group Y, etc) or will the playoff pools be based on the stats from the prelims? If the former, will the predeterminations be random or somewhat based on the initial pre-tournament seedings? Thanks.

Nick wrote:Another quick question: under the 72-team format outlined above, does a team's record from the prelims carry over to the playoffs and superplayoffs? So, like, will playoff teams be regrouped for superplayoffs based on just the 5 other playoff games from their playoff pool or against all 10 games they've played to that point?

The final ranking of the teams will depend only on how they perform on a common schedule: the superplayoff round robin (which includes one second-tier game for every team, against the other team that made the same superplayoff bracket). Gautam and I agree that ranking teams as such is the fairest way to deal with unevenness in prelim and second-stage brackets.

Nick wrote:Ok ok, im sorry for all these questions, but one more: Are the playoff pools predetermined for each prelim group (1st team in prelim group A goes to playoff group X, 2nd team in prelim group A goes to playoff group Y, etc) or will the playoff pools be based on the stats from the prelims? If the former, will the predeterminations be random or somewhat based on the initial pre-tournament seedings? Thanks.

I don't know if we've hammered down details that specific yet. I will get back to you.

Sorry to be random, but can someone direct me to a printable scoresheet for the new(ish) PACE format? I was unable to find one at pace-nsc.org.

etchdulac wrote:Sorry to be random, but can someone direct me to a printable scoresheet for the new(ish) PACE format? I was unable to find one at pace-nsc.org.

See Version D here. Note that I still haven't gotten around to updating it to set it up for the new overtime of three TU/bonus cycles.

jonpin wrote:See Version D here. Note that I still haven't gotten around to updating it to set it up for the new overtime of three TU/bonus cycles.

Thanks for the help.

A minor announcement about NSC's format: We are monitoring the registrations and have discussed alternate formats for various field sizes. We have enough flexibility to ensure that the NSC will run a fair and even format. The most likely format is last year's, which is for sixty-four teams. We will make further announcements as the tournament nears, and anyone with questions or concerns should email me at [email protected].

Quick reminder: if your coach or lead chaperon hasn't yet filled out the team information form, please have them do so soon.

We look forward to seeing everyone at Northwestern!

Cross posted from the PACE website:

Coaches, Team Captains, and Chaperones,

I am attaching herewith a document that goes over the tentative schedule and logistical information for the 2011 PACE NSC.

You can download the files from the following links:

PACE NSC 2011 - Logistics & Schedule Information (DOCX) or

PACE NSC 2011 - Logistics & Schedule Information (PDF)

Thank you,

Gautam Kandlikar

Furthermore, we will be posting information about a revised tournament format very soon.

Thank you,
Gautam Kandlikar

PACE NSC 2011 logistics document wrote:In addition to the standard tiebreakers, there will be an additional set of games to be played by the third place teams from each bracket to determine the four wildcard teams for the top playoff tier. The format to determine wildcards will be as follows:

• The third-place teams will be seeded 1-10 by bonus conversion.
• Minimatch 1 will feature a game between seed 5 and seed 10, and a second game between 6 and 9.
• The winner of the 5/10 game will play seed 3, and the winner of the 6/9 game will play seed 4 in Minimatch 2. The winners of these games will be Wildcard #3 and Wildcard #4 respectively.
• Full packet: Seed 1 plays seed 8, seed 2 plays seed 7 on a full packet. The winners of these games will be Wildcard #1 and Wildcard #2 respectively.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is going to result in a disaster. Assuming as it seems that the preliminary stage is ten groups of six, with top 2 plus 4 wildcards moving on to the top tier, you have the not-at-all-unlikely possibility of a team playing two minigames to determine their placement within their group, then two minigames to determine the wild cards, in the span of 45 minutes.

Further, you have an apparently inexplicable bracketing of 1-8; 2-7; 3-(5-10); 4-(6-9) that gives the 3 seed a potentially harder opponent than the 3 seed, the 7 and 8 seeds easier paths (winning one game rather than two) than the 5 and 6 seeds.

Can we presume that when the format is posted, you'll include an explanation of the decisions that led to the above?

The original post has been edited to reflect the updated PACE NSC format.

Our number of available packets places constraints on the wildcard procedure. The wildcards are important to the format for two reasons: first, the tournament works much better if we break down into 24, 18, and 18 than if we broke down into 20/20/20. Second, it gives the third-seed teams a chance to play their way into the top bracket. The format allows all teams a chance to play their way in, giving higher seeds more favorable matchups while still allowing everyone a fair shot to win their games.

Logistically, we have considered all tiebreaker/wildcard permutations and have plans in place to deal with all contingencies.

gkandlikar wrote:The ten third-place teams will be seeded 1-10 based on bonus conversion. Any ties will be broken using bounceback percentage (or a coinflip if still tied). Four teams (seeds 1 v. 8, 2 v. 7) will play single matches on a full packet to determine two of the wildcards. Four teams (seeds 5 v. 10, 6 v. 9) will play half-packet matches. The winners of those half-packet matches will play the 3 and 4 seeds to determine the other two wildcards. The 3 seed will play the weakest seed that advances, while the 4 seed will play the strongest seed that advances.

This seems really counter-intuitive, giving the 7 and 8 a potential advantage over the 5 and 6... The four teams that should have to win twice to advance should be the four worst teams, should they not?

Why not just have 7 v. 10 and 8 v. 9, and the winners play single-elimination games 1 v. 8/9, 2 v. 7/10, 3 v. 6, 4 v. 5?

This maintains the normal seeding pattern.

So I have done some brainstorming since Tuesday's format announcement. Some concerns that people had expressed about the original format were (a) the short preliminary round and (b) the quick and brutal cut, with only two from a group advancing. Some concerns about the current format are (a) the just-as-short preliminary round; (c) the strange wild card procedure; (d) a potentially too-generous cut. What I mean by (d) is that 40% of the field qualifies to the top tier and then the slate is wiped clean. I believe my below proposed structure is a good compromise between problems (b) and (d), avoids problem (c) entirely, and does not have drawback (a).

Preliminaries (Rounds 1-9 + T1): The preliminaries consist of six groups of ten teams each. Teams play a round-robin. The top three teams from each group (18 in total) will remain in contention for the championship. Ties for 3rd, 5th, 7th, or 9th are broken with Tiebreaker 1.

Playoffs (Rounds 10-14 + T2): The playoffs consist of five tiers of varying sizes, each containing one or more divisions of six teams each. From each group, teams 1-2-3 advance to Tier I; teams 4-5 to Tier II; teams 6-7 to Tier III; teams 8-9 to Tier IV; team 10 to Tier V. Thus Tier I has 3 divisions, Tier V has 1 division, and the other tiers have 2 divisions each. Each division plays a round-robin. Ties for 2nd or 4th in a Tier I division; or for any place in a Tier II-IV division are broken with Tiebreaker 2.

Placements for Tiers II-V (Round 15): Much as in the 2010 format, in Tiers II-IV, teams play a single game against the team with the same placement in the other division in their tier. In Tier V, the top two teams play, the middle two teams play, and the bottom two teams play one game to determine their final placements.

Superplayoffs for Tier I (Rounds 15-18): From each Tier I division, teams 1-2 advance to the Championship bracket; teams 3-4 to the 7th place bracket; teams 5-6 to the 13th place bracket. Each bracket plays four crossover games (and counts one carryover game).

Finals (T3 + Rounds 19-20): All ties in a superplayoff bracket, other than the top two, are broken with Tiebreaker 3 to determine final rank. The winner of the tournament is decided by advantaged final.

Speaking as someone who will be attending the NSC in my capacity of a coach of 2 teams there, I strongly would prefer PACE follow Jon Pinyan's preferred schedule over the inferior one they currently have proposed.

etchdulac wrote:Why not just have 7 v. 10 and 8 v. 9, and the winners play single-elimination games 1 v. 8/9, 2 v. 7/10, 3 v. 6, 4 v. 5?

This maintains the normal seeding pattern.

Yes, we will be adopting this suggestion. It makes it unquestionably more favorable to be a better seed than a worse seed in the wildcard phase. The #1 seed will play the weakest advancing of the 7-10 seeds and the #2 seed will play the strongest advancing of the 7-10 seeds. The other two games will be 3 v. 6 and 4 v. 5. All games will take place on half-packets. The 7 v. 10 and 8 v. 9 play-in games will happen first and the four wildcard-deciding games will happen concurrently shortly thereafter.

Charlie Dees wrote:Speaking as someone who will be attending the NSC in my capacity of a coach of 2 teams there, I strongly would prefer PACE follow Jon Pinyan's preferred schedule over the inferior one they currently have proposed.

Jon's format is along the lines of many of the ideas that we kicked around. But we actually cannot run an 18-game schedule based on the number of game packets available. Something similar may be possible, but Jon's exact format is not.

Even if we could, the disadvantages would outweigh the advantages. Primarily, Jon's schedule would force us to do two rebrackets during unnatural pauses in the schedule. My experience with large tournaments is that this is the biggest potential logistical snafu and should be avoided if at all possible.

Secondarily, I'm not convinced that cutting 70% of the field after nine rounds is more agreeable than cutting 60% of the field after five rounds. It seems to me that Jon's format is even more sensitive to initial seedings than the PACE format was last year, let alone any of the formats we've discussed this year. Jon proposes a nine-game preliminary schedule, but as outlined in previous discussions, bigger preliminary pools have a tendency to magnify the effects of seeding. So I see the fact that he is cutting 6 more teams based on bigger preliminary pools to be a drawback, not a strength.

To the wildcard issue, I believe that Stephen Fontenot's procedure, as adopted above, makes intuitive sense and that there is nothing strange about it.

In my mind, the current format is superior. It allows all teams an equal chance to play their way into the top bracket, and if anything, is too generous and not too stringent on who makes the top bracket. The pauses in the schedule occur at natural breaks. After the second phase, eight teams are still alive instead of six in Jon's format. The lower tiers do not play a significantly fewer number of games.

To sum it all up, we can't run Jon's proposal because it would require too many packets. Even if we could, it would create logistical issues with rebrackets. And I don't see enough benefit from Jon's schedule to outweigh the logistical problems and other potential drawbacks with his format.

Thanks for being open to suggestions.

The first post has been updated with links to the rules. Please note that the Format documents have also been updated to reflect a change in one of the buildings being used for the tournament and the updated wildcard procedure.

Thank you,
Gautam

jonpin wrote: I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is going to result in a disaster. Assuming as it seems that the preliminary stage is ten groups of six, with top 2 plus 4 wildcards moving on to the top tier, you have the not-at-all-unlikely possibility of a team playing two minigames to determine their placement within their group, then two minigames to determine the wild cards, in the span of 45 minutes.

This statement proved to be prophetic.

AlphaQuizBowler wrote:

jonpin wrote: I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is going to result in a disaster. Assuming as it seems that the preliminary stage is ten groups of six, with top 2 plus 4 wildcards moving on to the top tier, you have the not-at-all-unlikely possibility of a team playing two minigames to determine their placement within their group, then two minigames to determine the wild cards, in the span of 45 minutes.

This statement proved to be prophetic.

To be fair, the delays weren't, for the most part, due to the tiebreaker and wildcard games taking too long.

Were you even at this tournament? Seriously?

Guy has a point. While the tournament did need two tiebreakers games followed by two wildcard playoffs, this only equates to two full packets, which probably shouldn't have taken more than about an hour to 75 minutes to play, which is only 30 minutes more than was allotted for all of it. However, the tournament was delayed by much, much more than 30 minutes, meaning the show must have been a result of something else.

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:Were you even at this tournament? Seriously?

Per the timing done by central command, the tiebreakers ran twelve minutes longer than allotted.

Given that we sat in a room for like 45 minutes waiting for our game to start, after the tournament had already started round 1 incredibly late, and given that our prelim bracket basically got a whole round behind off the bat in round 1, leading the ridiculously long lunchbreak and tiebreaker to go way way way later than they were scheduled so that we started the 6th round, you know, that thing most tournaments get to at like 1 PM, at 4:30, I don't want to hear it. You are being incredibly insulting to teams trying to argue your way out of this one. Also, if you hadn't used this awful tiebreaker format you would have been able to cut out 2 half packets, and in a tournament this atrocious, every second counts to teams who are new to PACE and sitting around doing nothing for 3 hours and angry.

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:Given that we sat in a room for like 45 minutes waiting for our game to start, after the tournament had already started round 1 incredibly late, and given that our prelim bracket basically got a whole round behind off the bat in round 1, leading the ridiculously long lunchbreak and tiebreaker to go way way way later than they were scheduled so that we started the 6th round, you know, that thing most tournaments get to at like 1 PM, at 4:30, I don't want to hear it. You are being incredibly insulting to teams trying to argue your way out of this one.

Andy's saying that the amount of time from the start of the post-lunch tiebreakers to the end of the wildcard games was twelve minutes longer than allotted.

No, you were supposed to start round 6 at 2:30 and were a full 2 hours behind schedule, according to your schedule. There is no getting around that the tiebreakers did in fact contribute to this happening, (primarily through their existence in the first place).

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:No, you were supposed to start round 6 at 2:30 and were a full 2 hours behind schedule, according to your schedule. There is no getting around that the tiebreakers did in fact contribute to this happening, (primarily through their existence in the first place).

No one is denying that. We are using science to quantify the degree to which they contributed: twelve minutes. A full one hour and forty-eight minutes, then, arose due to other factors.

No one who has posted in this thread has attempted to deny the reality that we, as staffers, suffered through as well. We are disputing the specific assertion that Pinyan's statement about the tiebreakers specifically being likely disastrous proved prophetic. Of course, twelve minutes isn't great, but disastrous is something of an exaggeration. There are plenty of great things to discuss about logistics and such that could be ignored if we attempt to attribute too much of the delay to the wrong things.

Speaking as an outside observer, PACE's customer service has not appeared to improve since the original discussion of the format. I understand that people have different interpretations of the facts, but many of the statements offered here by PACE members can easily be interpreted as downplaying the logistical problems/delays, which I do not believe is anyone's intent.

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:No, you were supposed to start round 6 at 2:30 and were a full 2 hours behind schedule, according to your schedule. There is no getting around that the tiebreakers did in fact contribute to this happening, (primarily through their existence in the first place).

The endless wait was obviously completely embarrassingly unacceptable, and the single-elim tiebreaker might not have been the best idea either, but the tiebreaker took an hour to do; the rest of the wait had to do with deeper and more easily preventable logistical issues.

Cheynem wrote:Speaking as an outside observer, PACE's customer service has not appeared to improve since the original discussion of the format. I understand that people have different interpretations of the facts, but many of the statements offered here by PACE members can easily be interpreted as downplaying the logistical problems/delays, which I do not believe is anyone's intent.

I do believe it's Andy's intent, as he is one of the people whose gross mismanagement of PACE over the past year led to both the absolutely atrocious running of this year's NSC and the culture of "we can somehow prove that this format will work even after seeing that it, in reality, did not." He knows he's going to be held responsible and is desperately trying to stave it off by making ridiculous claims like "the THREE HOURS that it took to do lunch and tiebreakers were actually only twelve minutes longer than some mythical 'allotted time' therefore it's OK."

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:Were you even at this tournament? Seriously?

Per the timing done by central command, the tiebreakers ran twelve minutes longer than allotted.

Does this include the 15-20 minutes needed to try to get all 10 teams together so the tiebreaker rounds could start?

A Barehanded Telethon Mirth Gun wrote:

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:Were you even at this tournament? Seriously?

Per the timing done by central command, the tiebreakers ran twelve minutes longer than allotted.

Does this include the 15-20 minutes needed to try to get all 10 teams together so the tiebreaker rounds could start?

Or the 10-15 minutes it took after WC halfpacket 1 to get the teams only involved in WC halfpacket 2 to their rooms, even though those teams could have been told their rooms ahead of time?

I think it should also be pointed out that part of the delay was caused by a moderator that occurred in round 1 in Hunter's bracket in which 2 teams (not sure which) had to play a tiebreaker but then didn't since one team was ruled wrong, or that there was never a tie, or something to that effect from what I heard. That alone delayed the start of round 2 by a good hour.

A Barehanded Telethon Mirth Gun wrote:

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:Were you even at this tournament? Seriously?

Per the timing done by central command, the tiebreakers ran twelve minutes longer than allotted.

Does this include the 15-20 minutes needed to try to get all 10 teams together so the tiebreaker rounds could start?

This happened? Our last round before lunch finished at around 1:15. We were told that if we were third place we would need to be back in 90 minutes, 2:45 for us. We got back at around 2:40, and at around 2:45 we got a text telling us to be back by 3:20. The door to the room we were told to go to was locked (and, as far as I'm aware, remained so). At some time close to 4:00, somebody who I don't know walked down the hallway yelling "Walnut Hills, Walnut Hills follow me." If there was some time when the third place teams were supposed to be assembled together and told what our seedings were or anything, my team and I completely missed it.

Hey Joe: Let me apologize again for the buzzer screwup in your first round of the day. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome, but you guys lost out on a number of points.

Blahhunter wrote:I think it should also be pointed out that part of the delay was caused by a moderator that occurred in round 1 in Hunter's bracket in which 2 teams (not sure which) had to play a tiebreaker but then didn't since one team was ruled wrong, or that there was never a tie, or something to that effect from what I heard. That alone delayed the start of round 2 by a good hour.

Laffeaux. We were in Fisk, a building without a control room at all, which of course proved to be a self evidently bad idea before round 2 even got started for similar reasons. In our game against Chattahoochee, there was a bonus that needed to be replaced because of a bounceback accidentally being botched (I want to make a point that I'm not going to complain about that, everybody does it), but then the match ended in a tie, so we needed to get another bonus to properly play off the tie. This took us something like 10 extra minutes of waiting for the scorekeeper to go to the control room in another building and then come back with that question. At that point, I assumed our match was running well behind the rest of the bracket, and we went up to our next gameroom and milled around for a while, only to have the staff come in and inform us that they had caught a scoring error in their round 1 game between Cistercian and Macomb, which left the match in a tie they hadn't known about, so they had to have us get out of our seats and then they went and found the teams, and had to go to the other building as well to get their tiebreakers. By the time they ended up playing everything off, we were at least a full round behind.

As an outside observer, I'm curious if this tournament is usually held at a venue where four buildings are required for it to be played effectively. If no, then why was Northwestern chosen?

Well, Northwesten does have a building with tons of rooms where you could basically for sure run the NSC, or at least a lot of it, according to people who played ACF Nationals 2005 in said building. I don't know why this wasn't used.

Cheynem wrote:Hey Joe: Let me apologize again for the buzzer screwup in your first round of the day. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome, but you guys lost out on a number of points.

Yeah, LASA was absolutely a better team than us and would have won handily even without that. I had been pretty annoyed at my teammate for seemingly negging (badly) two TUs that I was trying to buzz on, and then became more frustrated that I should have actually been able to answer them. I'm just glad that it got resolved for future rounds, in case there were some in there that were closer where that could have made a difference. In the hierarchy of things that annoyed me this weekend, it would go somewhere below "getting texts at midnight." I'm still just confused as to how it happened; I thought everything had worked right beforehand, but apparently not.